The real job is not what's on your job description
Christian Idiodi, partner at SVPG, opens with a deliberately minimal definition of product management: you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them, and you do it well enough that they give you something back. That's it. Revenue, engagement, loyalty, referrals — these are what he calls the certificate of appreciation, the signal that the problem you solved was worth solving.
Notice what's missing from that definition: roadmaps. Stakeholder alignment. Sprint ceremonies. OKR check-ins. Idiodi doesn't dismiss those activities — he calls them consequences of doing real product work. The problem, he argues, is that most PMs have inverted the relationship. They do the consequences and skip the work. That inversion is the root cause of PM burnout.
Two checks worth running this month
Idiodi offers a two-part diagnostic for whether you're doing real product work or performing it. Is your work hard? Is it fun? Both matter, and both must be present.
- Hard but not fun means you're grinding on the wrong problem — one that's difficult but not genuinely uncertain or interesting.
- Fun but not hard is theater — work that feels productive but doesn't move anything.
Real product work is hard because the problem space is genuinely uncertain, and fun because that uncertainty is interesting to navigate. If your current workload doesn't pass both checks, Idiodi's advice is blunt: treat it as data, not a complaint.
Trust is borrowed before it's earned
For PMs trying to build influence in a new organization or a skeptical one, Idiodi's prescription is counterintuitive: find the loudest, most competent person in the building — the one everyone defers to — and ask them to teach you. Or offer to help them. "Intern for them," he says.
The mechanism is trust transfer. That influential person has already earned credibility with the organization. When you visibly learn from them and demonstrate you're absorbing what they know, their trust extends to you. The trust you borrow today is the trust you earn tomorrow.
Visibility is not optional
The trust-borrowing move only compounds if you keep learning visibly. Idiodi argues that the PM everyone wants on their team is the one whose Slack messages people open because they reliably deliver insight. The PM no one wants is the one who isn't visibly curious. The goal isn't just to become the most-informed person in the room — it's to be seen becoming that person, continuously, so that colleagues start routing discovery and data questions to you before decisions get made.
What this means for tomorrow
The practical upshot is a re-audit of how you spend your time. If your week is mostly roadmap maintenance, alignment meetings, and sprint facilitation, you may be doing a lot of consequence work and very little actual problem-solving on behalf of a specific person with a specific need. Idiodi's challenge: can you name whose problem you woke up to solve this morning — and do you have evidence they'd call it solved?